Tag: Photograph

The lure of the ankle

There’s an old myth that women in Victorian Britain were so uptight that they’d dress the legs of their furniture in small skirts to save them from the lascivious gaze of men. It is of course bullshit. Unless you’ve got a very unusual kink for carved wooden furniture, nobody is getting off on piano or table legs.

I’ve also heard it said that Victorian men were inordinately attracted to the lower legs and feet of ladies, because being covered by long skirts made them all the more enticing. It’s true that something being forbidden or taboo can be a natural for kinks, but this view seems equally unlikely to me. Almost nobody wears very long skirts these days, with feet, ankles and lower legs regularly on full display. Yet despite that, foot and shoe fetishism is still a huge kinky niche. Femdom porn is packed with it. Clearly it’s just a common kink that some people have. So while I’m sure there were plenty of Victorian men who enjoyed admiring a shapely ankle, it wasn’t a function of their fashion and prudish social values, but just kinky people being kinky.

I’m not sure when or where this image was originally shot. In the original tweet I sourced it from (by @mrunderheel), it’s labelled as coming from the 1920’s (about 20 years after the Victorian era). Personally I’d suspect a scene from an early movie, but a reverse image search doesn’t give me anything to go on.

Update: Thanks to Bacchus at ErosBlog I can now attribute this to a 1925 play called The Grand Duchess and the Waiter starring Basil Rathbone. Fans of early British cinema may recognize that name, as he played one of the most famous incarnations of Sherlock Holmes in the 30’s and 40’s. So in a strange twist, if you’ve got Amazon Prime, you can actually watch the man in this image from the 20’s in several movies streamed digitally to your home. They’re pretty entertaining even today.

Never Fails

One constant of any trip I arrange is that I’ll always just miss somebody that I’d really like to have intersected with. It doesn’t matter when or where, I’m guaranteed to buy tickets, arrange hotels and then realize I should have picked slightly different dates. It’s one of those immutable rules of life, like toast landing butter side down and USB plugs never going in the first way round you try them.

For my upcoming UK trip in August, my big miss will be Mistress Natsukiss who is going to be in London doing a Club Pedestal show in September. I’ve featured Mistress Natsukiss in past posts (for example here and here). She’s someone whose style and approach to femdom has always caught my eye, but I never thought I’d ever be lucky enough to watch her in action. It turns out I was actually right about that, but only just. For anyone lucky enough to actually be in London in September, then I think it’d be a show well worth attending.

These two beautiful shots are both from the twitter feed of Mistress Natsukiss. Her main web site is here. Check out the Club Pedestal site or follow their twitter feed for event tickets.

Her Barking Dogs

This is a continuation of the public worship/service theme from yesterday’s photograph. It’s a cute shot, although in its original context I’m not sure how much D/s was actually going on. Reverse image search tells me it’s from a 2015 Japanese movie called Orange, which appears to be a mainstream teenage drama/fantasy/love story. No mention of any kinks.

A Missed Opportunity

I’m always amazed that (as far as I know) nobody has put together a site with a definitive list of kinks and fetishes. It seems so unlike the internet to miss an opportunity to combine freaky sex and an anally retentive urge to exhaustively catalog something. After all, those are two of the defining characteristics of the online world.

I’m currently deep into an PC role playing game (Divinity Original Sin 2). It’s the kind of game that has hundreds of characters, artifacts, quests and storylines. Yet, every little piece of it has been exhaustively cataloged online across multiple sites. I can bump into a wood nymph in a fictional copse, in some obscure corner of the game, and I’m no more than a web search from her backstory, details on what she’s carrying and what’s the best way to steal it. Yet, if I wanted to find out what fetishes might relate to wood and trees, I’m kind of stuck (apparently it’s xylophilia).

Last year I found a link to some scanned pages that listed 547 paraphilias. That’s a decent number, but I’m not sure how reliable they all were, and a few scanned pages with no details isn’t a convenient representation. The Bad Girls Bible has published a shorter list of 239 entries, which is at least searchable and carries descriptions along with some cross-reference links. It’s certainly an improvement, but a long way from the definitive guide you’d expect to exist. For example, while it might include obscure things like Siderodromophilia (a fetish for trains) and Nyctophilia (fetish for the night), it missed basic stuff like public humiliation and service submission. I definitely find a lot more shots like the one below than I find of people getting frisky with the back of an Amtrak.

Glee with Savannah

I had a fabulous session with Savannah Sly last night. Much slapping, spanking, pinching and hitting was involved. I particularly enjoyed the play we did with clothespins. I generally don’t find them a particularly fearsome tool, so I was pretty relaxed and unintimidated when Savannah pulled a packet out. It turns out that when you put them in just the right spots – where the flesh is taut and thin – and you grab just a narrow pinch of the skin, they really get your attention fast. It was the right kind of pain to push all my masochistic buttons, particularly when I got called a ‘good boy’ for relaxing into it.

I think at one point Savannah might have done the happy sadist dance, which put a big smile on my face. She’s definitely a very gleeful domme, as this image from her twitter feed shows. This was taken in 2009 at SXSW. It’s a wonderful happy shot, and I can say that ten years on, Savannah has lost absolutely none of that positive energy when playing. You can see a lot more of her imagery, both old and new, on her Only Fans site. If you’re not in a position to see her in person, then it’s well worth checking out.

A vicious streak a mile wide

I’m not totally sure what’s going on in this image, but I’m definitely a fan. It’s a look that seems to be a gothic lolita fetish femdom bunny. I know some pro-dommes have very extensive fetish wardrobes, but this seems like it’d be a difficult kink to pull off. How many have a pair of bunny ears color coordinated to their latex and corsets?

This is one of a series of images featured in this tweet. The photographer is @ymagiyoiriugiyo and the model ⁦‪@naruhodo_chan⁩.

Bonus points for any reader who can identify the connection between the post title and the image.

Bad Assumptions

This Frisky article on the bad assumptions people make about kink and kinky dating made my smile, albeit in a rueful way. The anecdote that really hits home features a roommate who interprets her friends preference as a ‘dom’ to mean being a professional dominatrix, and then thinks clients are getting invited over for their games night. I guess that’s what happens when people get all their information about kink from shitty memoirs.

I struggle with the perception of kink with the friends that I’m out to. On one hand I don’t want to get into too much detail about my sessions and personal sexual practices. Describing what an awesome play piercing session I just had doesn’t really make for a comfortable dinner conversation. At the same time, I see the common representations of femdom in popular culture, and wonder how it colors their view of me. I assume they think I get off on crawling around on the floor at the end of a leash and being called a miserable maggot by a lady in head to toe leather.  Which is all perfectly fine if you’re into it, but doesn’t really look anything like how I actually play. I don’t know how to communicate the complexity and richness of D/s and kink without an uncomfortable amount of oversharing.

I’m fairly certain this vintage shot is how my non-kinky friends picture my sex life when the subject of dommes or BDSM comes up. And it’s not like I’d object to doing a scene like this, it’s just not representative.

Incompetent or Evil?

Some rare good news for my old country – the UK has indefinitely suspended introducing their porn blocking system. I’d like to say this was because they realized the danger to free speech and had a sudden burst of sanity, but it was really just down to incompetence. I guess if someone comes up with a stupid idea, the best you can hope for is that they’re too stupid to carry it out properly.

In less good news over this side of the pond, US politicians are once again having a go a free speech online and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. As always, sex workers are the canary in the coalmine. Having used bogus sex trafficking fears to weaken the law with SESTA/FOSTA, they’re now trying to expand the wedge and jam more free speech constraints in place. The online tech companies originally lobbied against SESTA/FOSTA, but eventually caved to the politicians. Presumably they thought it was a safe compromise on a topic they didn’t want to defend. Maybe now they’ll learn their lesson. Politicians have an endless appetite for limiting what people can discuss and share, and compromising in one area will only increase that appetite in other areas.

Here’s an image that seems suitable for a politician trying to limit free expression. Although if all the members of the Soviet’s security forces had looked like this, America might actually have lost the cold war.

This is Mistress Nikita. She no longer takes professional sessions but you can access images and video from her main site here.

Pride Knights

Here’s another Pride themed post to finish the weekend off. This is from a tweet by A. Archer, an artist, model, cosplayer and adventurer.  Not strictly femdom, but I’m sure there’ll be many readers out there who appreciate a lady in armor with a big sword. I think it’s a very fun shot, particularly with the six different colors represented across the back row of people.

It seems odd to see brightly colored outfits for combat, but for hundreds of years that was actually common. Not sure anybody ever went in for a rainbow outfit, but before the days of accurate long distance rifles and rapid firing machine guns, camouflage was a low priority.  It was better to look good and create cohesive units that could be easily identified. It wasn’t until the wars of the late 19th and early 20th century that being hard to see suddenly became a big advantage. As an interesting aside, the creator of the Pride Flag, a man called Gilbert Baker, was actually an army veteran who served between 1970 and 72.

If you’d like to support future work of Archer Inventive, there’s a Patreon here.